


What Lies Ahead I Cannot Guarantee

by Leamas



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Divine Nonsense Adjacent, Introspection, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:55:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22792852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: Mike Crew accepts his new life gratefully. (Immediately after throwing himself from the Cathedral.)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 32





	What Lies Ahead I Cannot Guarantee

Eventually Mike landed.

He didn’t know how long he fell for—whether it was hours or weeks, or longer—but he saw immediately that he was nowhere that he recognised. Mike sat up, feeling the cold earth under his hand, the slick wet grass, and he looked around himself at the field that he was now laying in. He saw no end to the distance surrounding him, no trees, no houses, no lights except for what came from the stars. In the distance he thought that he saw the dark shape of a mountain range looming against the night sky, noticeable not for its size nor presence but because he could see no stars where they should have been.

There was no moon. The stars were bright enough that every blade of wild grass shone blue. His own skin, too, was awash with white light. Mike looked down at his hands and made a fist, before relaxing his grip and again looking around.

 _Ex Altiora_ lay an arm’s length from Mike, face-up and closed and also bathed in light. He crawled over to the book; knelt in front of it as he ran his hand along the length of the spine. Touching it now felt no different to when he held it before. He didn’t know why he expected that it should be.

Carefully he pushed the cover open. Every word stood out against the page clearly to Mike, despite the dark. The only difference that he saw as he turned through its pages was that now there was a woodcut image of a starless sky. He could no more read the book now than he could after he’d purchased it, and out here, wherever he was, he didn’t even have the Latin-English dictionary that he had used to translate the text. Yet as he held it, as he stared at the words, its meaning was incredibly clear, and as he knelt in the dirt holding the book that was his last connection to the life that he’d just escaped, an overwhelming helplessness stabbed through him.

Mike had been helpless before, and this was truly different. It wasn’t the fear that had followed him through most of his life while he tried to outrun that which he always knew would find him again. After leaving home he’d felt the sheer size of the whole world stretching out before him; but shrinking just by knowing that there was nowhere that he could run that would be far enough to really protect him. Mike had no one in his life to miss him or to worry after him; there was no one who understood the magnitude of his fear or what directed it. Through it all Mike had felt small and powerless, and wished himself to be small enough that he could not be found or touched by anything ever again.

Sitting here, Mike was aware of that same insignificance, but it was in a way that was different to before. He looked away from the book in his hands to the open air, the skies, the distant mountains and the light that came from nowhere; that poured from his own body. The sky was clear. Mike drew in a lungful of cold air.

His thoughts were empty. He made the cursory observation that this was the kind of place that he avoided for fear that his tormentor would find him again, but the observation was like a memory, a thought that came to him more out of habit than because of a genuine belief that he might have been followed.

He closed the book and pushed himself to his feet, stumbling slightly before he regained his balance. The air was thin here, and cold. Doubt prickled at the back of his thoughts as he tried to decide what he should do now. Start walking? But to where? There was nothing in sight, except for (possibly) the mountains that he thought that he could see in the distance, and in the dark they looked menacing and unpleasant.

There was no reason to believe that he had to start walking now; he could wait until morning, maybe. Mike didn’t think that there was anywhere that he needed to be—he felt no compulsion to seek out anything—but he didn’t want to stand still, or to start waiting for something that might not come. He didn’t think that anything would come for him, besides.

Mike tucked the book closer against his chest as he looked around himself, before finally shaking his head and starting to walk. It didn’t matter which direction he chose, as he had no frame of reference. At first he was wary that he might stumble into something. The landscape might look completely uniform, but for all Mike knew the ground could be dotted with holes to stumble into, or ridges in the dirt that he might trip over, and this wasn’t the kind of place where he wanted to find himself with a twisted ankle. But he was fine.

Just like he didn’t know for how long he fell, or how far he fell, Mike had no idea how long he walked for. He felt no tiredness, no hunger. When he looked behind him, the ground looked the same as the ground ahead. The mountains remained stark on the horizon, and the stars above remained bright and constant.

It occurred to Mike after a time that maybe the fall hadn’t lasted for as long as he remembered, and that he’d just died. How would he know? He tried to think back to his other two near-death experiences, wishing that he could remember more clearly what had happened when the lightning struck. He remembered being in the hospital, and how aware he was of his body; something felt wrong in a way that he’d not been able to describe at the time and still couldn’t, because it wasn’t anything that he had any basis of comparison for. It had hurt; _he_ had hurt. But as difficult as the sensation was to place, Mike had no doubt that it was very real in a physical way that felt no different to how the air felt cold now or the ground felt solid, although damp, under his feet. And the other time, when the house collapsed, killing his parents and pinning him beneath the rubble until the emergency response team was able to free him, what he’d felt had been a very physical thing as well. A beam from the ceiling had fallen across his chest with so little give that he’d not been able to do much except lay there, struggling to breathe until he was brought to safety. Part of the wall had fallen across his legs, and if he’d not been so afraid of shifting something the rubble so that it crushed his chest, he could have freed them; instead he was just aware of the gradual loss of feeling in his legs as his blood supply was cut off. Through it all, he’d been aware of the rumbling of thunder in the distance, the flashing lights that he could see between the pieces of rotting wall and decaying metal, which had seemed just as real as the debris that dug into him—and in its own way, it had been.

This was a place of power, wherever it was, like what he’d found through the back gate when his pursuer followed him home for the first time—something that didn’t exist, that _couldn’t_ exist, but that he’d walked through all the same. Unlike then what he saw here didn’t break him. There was nothing that made him want to scream (except curiosity, because he wanted to know how far his voice would carry and what it would feel like to scream into something as vast as this); nothing about this place was impossible at all, except for the distance. What was remarkable was how he came to be here.

Eventually Mike stopped walking. There was no difference between this step and the last that made him decide here was far enough—nothing about this plot of land was special, and he didn’t know if a concept of _far enough_ even existed here. The ground wasn’t uniform; there were hills and a few trenches, some parts of the dirt that looked like something had burrowed into them, although Mike saw no animals. At first he’d thought it all looked repetitive, and he still did, but the differences seemed obvious now. There were more weeds in this part of the wild grass now, including some plants that he was fairly certain weren’t local to anywhere in Europe. There was no change to the lighting in the sky, nor to the clusters of stars that Mike didn’t recognise. When he looked back to the mountains, they seemed to have shifted slightly, or to have grown to an even further distance.

And that… didn’t really bother him as much as he thought that it should. He didn’t like it. Although the world looked like his own, he knew that it wasn’t; distance didn’t seem to mean anything here, and he suspected that time didn’t, either, looking at the sky. But the idea that he would be here forever, with nothing familiar and nothing known to him, and nothing that was _his_ , seemed like a very human fear to have, but one that Mike didn’t have to worry about anymore. (Out of habit, he touched his neck, running his fingers over the scar.) Looking around himself, he wasn’t afraid of the boredom or the loneliness. If he was afraid of anything, the source of that fear was unknown to him. He belonged here.

He belonged to whatever was here.

He’d thrown himself from the bell tower of the cathedral knowing that he was surrendering his life to something greater than himself—anything to escape his tormenter—and now he stood with that decision, here, in this expanse. Mike supposed that this, at least, was confirmation that it had accepted him.

He sat down, relieved that he wasn’t hungry or thirsty, or even particularly tired, but only now aware that he was unfathomably exhausted. The sky was still clear, the air still cold. It wouldn’t be comfortable to sleep, or even to sit for too long, but Mike no longer cared about that, either. He tucked _Ex Altiora_ close against his chest and leaned against his knees, allowing himself to rest. He’d grown used to how everything was still washed pale by the starlight, but not to the fact that he could see his own skin so plainly. It was curiosity more than anything else that led him to unwrap his scarf from around his neck, folding it and setting it gently beside him, and then to slip off his jacket let it fall on the ground behind him. He pulled the collar of his shirt down as far as it would stretch without tearing, reaching a hand up to touch what of the scar he could see. It was the same as it had always been, at least on the surface. He’d always known that part of the scar reached further into his body, like roots that had taken hold a long time ago, but it was only now that this feeling was gone that he realised just how unnatural that had been—he could not remember what it felt like at all, except that it felt _wrong_.

Mike followed the scar along his back and sides, his fingers trailing over the edges of it. However the light here chose to bend around him so that he could still see all of himself, it seemed unbothered by the scar; it looked pale and ghostly on his skin, but no more so than any of the others.

He wasn’t really alone here. He’d known that for a while. There was nothing to be seen in any direction, save for the emptiness, but that emptiness was with him; had followed him. Even aware of this, Mike still looked around for someone or something more tangible to address.

Finally he settled for staring down at the book.

“You brought me here,” he said flatly. There was absolutely no response. He held the book tighter, tensing in anticipation of something, although sitting here, he felt shockingly empty and certain that nothing would happen to him.

Mike was never religious growing up; in his whole like, the most that faith ever played a role in his life was at his parents’ funeral. It was only later when he thought back that it occurred to him how strange that all was, the prayers and the blessings, the church, for two people who never did more than say grace before dinner and speak their desire for good weather and safe travel vaguely in God’s direction.

Mike knew what people meant when they talked about religion, and their connection to the divine. In his search for a Leitner that could help him he’d met a handful of people that talked about worshipping the power on the other side of those books with such conviction that he could at least believe in their belief. Prayer, he supposed, was the form of address that was closest to what he was trying to do now, and he further supposed that this was why he felt self-conscious. He didn’t feel that he was speaking to nothing—only to the open space around him—but that what he had to say was so profoundly unimportant that there was no need to bring it up.

The only other time that he’d addressed a power like this before was as a teenager, mentally begging the Lichtenberg figure to leave him alone and to not hurt him. Eventually he’d stopped, realising somewhere along the way that it was not something to be negotiated with but rather to be fought. That was his only basis for comparison to what he was trying to accomplish here.

Whatever that was.

He had questions, but the idea of actually voicing them and putting them to the power that brought him here seemed absurd. He was under no false belief about what it was that he’d just done, surrendering himself as he’d thrown himself from the bell tower of Chichester Cathedral. It hadn’t been for wishing to be saved that he’d been brought here; casting himself into the open air was his acceptance that should he be saved, then it would be at the choice of an entity far more powerful than he.

That he was here now was not a favour but part of an exchange, but it seemed redundant to ask what was expected of him in return. If a human had been able to save him from the Lichtenberg figure, Mike might have said that he owed them his life, which would mean that he’d continue to pay—whether by favour or by gratitude—for the duration of his time still breathing. But as it was, he’d already paid, willingly giving himself over to this. He was still _living_ now, but changed in a way that he’d never considered before and so couldn’t articulate. His life belonged to something else; _what he was_ belonged to something else, and he knew this.

He knew this instinctively.

“Thank you,” Mike said. Slowly, he ran his hand over the cover of the book before turning away from it, looking up towards the sky and staring until his eyes blurred and he saw only an undefined darkness. “When I think about the idea of something that’s endless, there is only one moment that comes to mind. Sometimes I think that it never really ended. That was when I was eight, and struck by lightning.” His words were weak and halting. He had things that he wanted to say, but each one was an effort. “There were other moments that I thought that what I would last forever, but they never did. Even if the Lichtenberg figure had hunted me until I died—even that wouldn’t have been forever.” As he considered this an old rage flickered to life inside of him again, something born of the unfairness at being robbed of his own life, although with none of the blinding intensity that he used to feel. “But it did end,” Mike finally said, quietly, to himself more so than the empty, vast expanse around him.

There was no acknowledgement of what he’d said, and so he sat there, with the sense that he could have said nothing at all and that it would have made no difference, but also as if he was being left still waiting for a response. Something within himself eased; he had the sense of something settling, knowing that his message had been received but as it had been he alone who had acknowledged what he’d said.

When Mike lay down he didn’t think that he would sleep, knowing that he could stand up and continue walking with no problem. But he did fall asleep. Waking, it surprised him to find that the air was somehow colder still. He’d pulled his jacket around himself before laying down in the dirt, but as he sat up and saw a layer of mud stuck to his jacket he was surprised. The ground had been damp but not muddy when he’d lay down. He did his best to brush the dirt from his clothes and his face, then wrapped his scarf around his neck again before pulling himself back to his feet.

The vertigo struck him quite suddenly and he stumbled forward several feet, almost falling to the ground again but bracing himself against his knees instead. It didn’t exactly pass, but the intensity of first feeling that the ground had fallen from beneath his feet faded, and he realised that despite the stomach-clenching vertigo he could actually stand relatively easily. _Ex Altiora_ still lay on the ground, and he briefly doubted whether he would be able to go through the process of reaching over to pick it up while he felt this way, but ultimately he managed that with no problem.

The sky was still dark, but cloudy; the stars seemed fewer when he looked out, like a quiet barrier blotted them out. After a moment Mike realised that the thin veil looked like light pollution. The sky itself, though, still looked completely foreign, with none of the familiar constellations. He looked for the mountain range that had run along the side of his vision all the night before (or whatever he should use to classify that period of undefinable time), and saw that it was still present. There still seemed to be no end to the fields that he walked through, although they looked different from the night before in countless small ways.

Shaking his head Mike began to walk again. He hadn’t been wrong—the air _was_ colder now, and although the ground hadn’t exactly been even the day before, the fact that it was more jagged beneath his feet now didn’t necessarily mean anything. What position was he in to comment on how an entity powerful enough that others might worship it as a god decided to landscape its domain? Yet he kept looking up, expecting to see something new, where nothing had changed at all the day before or in the time before he’d slept.

After a time, though, the clouds started to disperse and the sky began to lighten. What remained of the stars was now taking on shapes that were familiar to Mike—constellations that he’d watched in fields not unlike this as a child, and then from the windows of various homes that he’d lived in when he was too afraid to do that. Gradually mist rose from the ground as the air began to warm, practically obscuring any distance that was further than about three metres ahead of him. It parted as he walked through it and when it began to fade, the sun now shining brightly overhead, he realised that there was _something_ in front of him. It wasn’t much: simply a tree, and a fence that marked the edge of the field that he walked through. Following the barbed fence to the left he saw that it dipped down a hill, leading towards the kind of devil’s woods that was a common feature in the English countryside. In the other direction was a road, and the sound of traffic. And looking behind himself, in the direction from where Mike came, was an ordinary field not unlike the one that he’d woken in that morning.

Soon Mike was walking along the dual-carriage-way, aware of two things: that passengers in the cars driving past him on the road were looking at him oddly; and that the temperatures were picking up to well above what he would have expected for a day this early in the spring. His scarf was claustrophobic and overbearing, and soon no matter how many times he adjusted it, it was still just damp with his own sweat and itchy, caked with mud from that morning. Finally he just tore the damn thing off and shoved it in his pocket. He ran a hand through his hair and shook it out, gratefully giving his skin the chance to breathe. His heavy coat followed: first unbuttoned, then slipped over his shoulders and finally taken off and folded over his arm. Mike was used to doing what was necessary to cover his scar, but in temperatures more suitable to summer he at least usually was wearing a more appropriate jacket.

He was also aware, as he passed by a few farmhouses and then crossed the boundary into one of the many little English commuter towns that were absolutely forgettable, that he wasn’t dressed for being out at all. When Herbert Knox had come in search of the book—he tucked _Ex Altiora_ closer against him at the thought—he’d just been wearing the clothes that he’d slipped on a few days before. A loose grey t-shirt, a pair of jeans. Really, he was lucky that he’d had the sense to put on shoes, when he thought of all the walking that he’d just done. He’d been expecting what came next, hadn’t he? _Almost like I was warned,_ he thought, with a sudden surge of warmth that was unrelated to the weather gripping him.

Mike wasn’t any dirtier than what he’d expect after having spent several days locked in his flat, obsessively working to translate the Latin, and then sleeping out in the field. He probably looked quite odd, he thought as he turned off at the local Spar that every little English town had (wherever ‘local’ was), dressed like he was, dishevelled, and with his scar on full display.

He checked his pockets before crossing the car park to see if he had any change, before realising what he was doing. The thought struck him as being _completely ridiculous_. After spending all night (or whatever) walking through the domain of what he could only easily call a god, he was now back to worrying about something as ordinary as whether he had the change needed to buy a can of soda.

He laughed as he pushed the door open, then let the sound die off once he realised that he was now in the company of other people… of people.

“Remember to remind your mum to stop by later today to pick up her order,” said the middle-aged woman behind the counter was saying to a little girl who was paying for a toastie all in small change.

“Okay, okay,” the girl said, taking her toastie. “I’m going home right now.”

As she turned away from the counter she fell onto her knees, wrapping an arm around her stomach. The woman behind the counter leaned over to see what had happened, then raised her head and looked at Mike, raising her head so that she met his own eyes with her own. He nodded to her, and a groan escaped her mouth as she stumbled back, gripping the shelves behind her for support.

“Oh, hell,” she was saying, closing her eyes.

The girl now on the ground collected her change as Mike watched, then grabbed her breakfast toastie and held it as tightly against her chest as Mike held _Ex Altiora_. She pushed herself onto her feet with effort, then stumbled forward several steps before catching the door and bursting outside, into the warm morning air. From the walkway, she looked back through the window at Mike, before abruptly turning away and sprinting off in the direction of the rest of the town.

He watched her leave, then walked towards the back of the shop, to the refrigerators where the sodas were kept, taking the first thing that he saw. Although he was back to a world that was familiar, apparently, he still didn’t feel thirsty like he would have in the past. Even the unusually warm temperature was only uncomfortable: he didn’t think that he’d actually suffer for it if he just started walking again.

There was someone else in the shop with him, a teenaged boy only a few years younger than Mike. He stared unashamedly, gawking at Mike so openly that it was almost amusing. A familiar self-consciousness briefly swelled within him, but it was only like taking a breath. After a moment it passed, leaving Mike simply aware that somebody was looking at him.

It was with a jolt that Mike realised that the boy really was looking at _him_ —not at his scar, as was the usual reason that people stared.

“Is something wrong?” Mike asked pleasantly.

“How did you get here?” the boy asked.

“The same as you, I’d imagine,” Mike said, nodding towards the front of the shop, where the cashier had now turned away to reorganised the cigarettes behind in the display case behind the counter. “I walked through the door.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Then how do you think that I got here?”

“I don’t know!” the boy snapped. “One moment you were just _there_. How would I know where you were before that?”

Mike shook his head, as though exasperated. “Outside,” he said, remembering involuntarily the endless fields that he’d just finished walking through. Distantly, he heard himself ask, “Where else would I come from?”

“That isn’t what I meant,” the boy said, then lowered his voice. “If it’s a trick, then it’s a good one.”

“There was no trick.”

The boy looked dubious. “I was watching that spot right there when you appeared.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Mike said, but then raised the hand that was holding the can of soda. “If you’ll excuse me.”

He nodded as he turned towards the counter, his heart racing. When he looked back over the shoulder, the teenager was no longer watching him, instead appearing very invested in the cans lined across the shelves in front of him. Just by being here he’d had some effect on the people in the shop, he knew that; it was a shame that he hadn’t asked what the boy had seen, although that wouldn’t have actually given him the answers that he wanted. It was no matter. Calmly, he walked to the front of the shop to pay for his drink.

The cashier met his gaze with a steady look of her own—very different to the way that she’d looked at him when he’d first walked in. As unsettling as her scrutiny was, though, it didn’t really bother him.

“Do you want change or notes?” she asked when he slid a twenty across the counter.

“Change, please.”

She held the coins out in front of them, carefully dropping them into his hand when he extended his palm. When her skin brushed against his, he was aware of how solid she felt. She wiped her hand against her shirt.

He saw the moment when she noticed the scar, for her eyes dropped a moment later to his arms. She frowned. “I don’t think you’ll be needing that jacket, in this weather.”

“You’d probably say that I don’t need my scarf, either.”

“Why do you have a scarf with you?” Her eyes widened then in the familiar look that Mike had seen many times before, of people suddenly remembering the scar and drawing their own connections. He’d barely thought of it, either, though—might have hardly ever thought about it again, maybe, if he’d simply continued to wander through the endless expanses where he found himself after falling.

“Do you think it’s warm for this time of the year?”

“No, not really.”

“How much hotter will it get?”

“Mid-twenties, later this week,” she said. “Although meteorologists aren’t always right. They hardly ever are, actually.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “But thanks. I was wondering why it felt so warm.”

The woman sighed, then gave a laugh that almost sounded sincere, if only it didn’t sound so shaky and uncertain. “You know what they say in the newspapers. A ‘shocking heatwave’ is sweeping the nation. Everyone else has a name for it, you know. They call it ‘summer.’”

“Summer,” Mike repeated flatly. “Right.”

“You really are surprised, aren’t you?” She sounded disbelieving. And she looked at him now with an even deeper scrutiny, like she was trying to work it out from his perspective. He couldn’t exactly blame her, because he could imagine how this looked: a stranger in her village of probably no more than five hundred, walking into her shop and acting surprised at the weather. He wasn’t even an inconspicuous stranger.

“Thank you for your help,” Mike said. “It’s appreciated. If you’ll excuse me.”

On his way out he let himself catch a glimpse of the newspapers, with the date printed boldly at the front. He could have laughed, but he just hurried ahead. Trying not to think of where he was going, or where he was at all.

Months had passed since he’d purchased _Ex Altiora_ , according to the receipt that the owner of Lion Street Books had insisted on giving him. For Mike it was really only a few days. He didn’t even know what day ‘today’ was supposed to be by his count; since taking the book home with him, he’d allowed his obsession with the book to draw him in. Even though not long had passed (for him), it was hard to remember anything else about that time except the book. This, at least, made sense—for the time that he was working on the translation, nothing else in the world had mattered to him. _Why bother remember it?_ He thought he could become hysterical, but the feeling passed, replaced by the coldness of observation as he considered those days.

He wished that the date that he associated with what he’d done was the day that he’d thrown himself from the Cathedral; that was infinitely more significant than just the purchase of the book from Knox. Those were his last days in that life, and he’d spent them entirely in preparation for this. Oh, he’d known for a long time that he’d have done anything to get away from his pursuer; had thought himself prepared for anything that would come. This didn’t shake the feeling that he’d left something behind when he tore from his flat, and that even if he tried to return for it now it wouldn’t be there.

He probably wouldn’t have cared this much if the event itself didn’t seem shrouded in so much confusion. The fall, or the leap. He knew that he’d thrown himself over the edge, willingly and eagerly, but the moment before he reached the precipice was just a blur of fear and desperation. The Lichtenberg figure was with him, as close as it had ever been. Mike had _finally_ possessed the means to fight back against it, which had been the singular focus of this obsession for years, but it hadn’t felt as final and decisive as he’d imagined. When he’d thrown himself from the edge, it felt like an end.

Mike rubbed at his neck; an old habit that he needed to shake. Of course he hadn’t known what would happen when he jumped. Even now he couldn’t say with any certainty what change had taken place, only that something was different. Just as something had meant for him to arrive wherever it was that he’d just been, it didn’t feel like an accident that he was here. His presence carried with it an intent—just not his own. That was gone, now, and he felt its absence. With that in mind, it really wasn’t fair to look back at what he’d done then and how he’d felt in the final moments before his transformation and expect to understand it.

Anyway, there were more immediate considerations that he could be thinking about instead. Why should his last thoughts before taking such a leap mean anything to him now?


End file.
